Mostly the thought and the verse come inseparably. In my poem Poetics, it's as close as I come to telling how I do it.
Howard Nemerov

My favourite poem is the one that starts 'Thirty days hath September' because it actually tells you something.
Groucho Marx

My secret dream is to write an epic poem. That's probably the most pretentious thing I've said.
Laurie Anderson

My sense of a poem - my notion of how you revise - is: you get yourself into a state where what you are intensely conscious of is not why you wrote it or how you wrote it, but what you wrote.
Philip Levine

No good poem, however confessional it may be, is just a self-expression. Who on earth would claim that the pearl expresses the oyster?
C. Day Lewis

No other human being, no woman, no poem or music, book or painting can replace alcohol in its power to give man the illusion of real creation.
Marguerite Duras

No poem is easily grasped; so why should any reader expect fast results?
John Barton

No poem, not even Shakespeare or Milton or Chaucer, is ever strong enough to totally exclude every crucial precursor text or poem.
Harold Bloom

No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem.
Booker T. Washington

No, I think that a person writes a poem because they have an inner urge of something that they want to express, and I think it's that inner urge that you want to express when you write a piece of music.
Leo Ornstein

Of course a poem is a two-way street. No poem is any good if it doesn't suggest to the reader things from his own mind and recollection that he will read into it, and will add to what the poet has suggested. But I do think poetry readings are very important.
James Laughlin

Of the individual poems, some are more lyric and some are more descriptive or narrative. Each poem is fixed in a moment. All those moments written or read together take on the movement and architecture of a narrative.
Marilyn Hacker

One will never again look at a birch tree, after the Robert Frost poem, in exactly the same way.
Paul Muldoon

Only truthful hands write true poems. I cannot see any basic difference between a handshake and a poem.
Paul Celan

Ordering a man to write a poem is like commanding a pregnant woman to give birth to a red-headed child.
Carl Sandburg

Our moments of inspiration are not lost though we have no particular poem to show for them; for those experiences have left an indelible impression, and we are ever and anon reminded of them.
Henry David Thoreau

Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally, in the end, pleasure.
Mark Strand

Peace goes into the making of a poem as flour goes into the making of bread.
Pablo Neruda

Perhaps first and foremost is the challenge of taking what I find as a reader and making it into a poem that, primarily, has to be a plausible poem in English.
Marilyn Hacker

Poe's saying that a long poem is a sequence of short ones is perfectly just.
John Drinkwater